Being "Taken"

I saw the movie Taken a while back at the discount cinema outside of Austin. I paid $1.50 to watch ex-CIA officer Liam Neeson rescue his daughter from white slave traffickers and can honestly say I got my money’s worth, but no more, because I never completely engaged with the material. Part of it was due to the standard movie thriller ridiculousness – firing guns in small apartments without deafening any of the occupants, or even alerting neighbors – but more of it had to do with its betrayal of how the best thrillers should work, and with a fundamental flaw with this type of thriller.

The best thrillers traditionally concern ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They may have specialized knowledge or hobbies (see the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s sublime Rogue Male), they may possess specialized skills (see Rambo, sans the John, in David Morrell’s brutal but effective First Blood), but on they whole they are regular people who must overcome incredible odds in order to survive. (In this respect, they resemble American naturalists such as Jack London, whose protagonists faced incredible challenges, many of them natural, that were often too great for their own modest abilities.) Law enforcement either cannot or will not believe their circumstances, either because they believe the protagonist to be delusional, or because they believe the protagonist to be the actual danger, or because they themselves are complicit in the conspiracy against the protagonist. The antagonists themselves are often smarter, better equipped, better manned and better funded, which means that the protagonist must learn to outsmart his or her opponents. He must learn that he is better than they. It is something Hitchcock understood when he made The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, and which the first-time director of Taken turns upside down.

Taken’s protagonist is ex-CIA. He is better trained than his Armenian antagonists they have more people and more money, but aren’t any smarter than your average street thugs, making them little threat. (Indeed, they resemble the Spangled Mob in Ian Fleming’s novel Diamonds Are Forever, who has significant manpower but nothing in the way of brains.) This bleeds the film of suspense because it treats the viewer not to an ordinary man overcoming extraordinary odds, but a trained professional picking off second-rate criminals. It’s like watching an exterminator kill roaches or a pimply teenager play a video game: mildly amusing, but lacking in any real involvement. A better way to have handled the material would have been to have Kim, Neeson’s daughter, once captured, overcome her captors and escape. Instead, actress Maggie Grace spends most of her time staggering through her scenes in a drugged state. By focusing on Neeson’s professional, the filmmakers fuel a power fantasy of justifiable homicide.

If Taken upends the standard thriller format, it retains the thriller’s fundamental flaw: nothing actually happens. Neither the world nor the characters that inhabit it change. In the thriller, sabers may rattle, but in the end the protagonist manages to keep the world in the same shape it was before bad people decided to do bad things. It upholds the status quo, keeping the social order instead of transforming it, even if the transformation might be horrifying.

This is not always the case. Change occurs in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, as well as in the film version of The Sum of All Fears, but for the most part the protagonist’s challenge, for all of the events that unfold, involves keeping change from the Hegelian “becoming” into “being.” This is exactly the opposite of how fiction should work.

The world of the thriller is rigid, frozen, unchanging. But things change. Things do change, even in what we consider escapist fiction. Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which Paul Atreides is left by the Harkonnens to die in the desert. He does not fight to restore the old social order, but instead ursurps it, turning Arrakis over to the Fremen. And Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination does not try to return PyrE to its rightful owners, but instead gives the entire solar system the ability to use PyrE…for their own benefit, or their own destruction. Even the most recent Star Trek movie, by destroying the planet Vulcan and altering the entire series’ time stream, changed the very universe on which its initial template was built.

It would be nice to see a thriller, either in film or in print, break this mold. If the very nature of fiction is change, then the thriller could benefit from letting their protagonists change the world, rather than letting it stagnate.

Crazy sort of folk: Lansdale takes a 'Vanilla Ride'

My interview with Joe R. Lansdale appears in today's San Antonio Current.

“[The Hap and Leonard stories] are crazy sort of folk tales mixed with reality, but it’s always the social and cultural issues and the two characters that drive the series.”
— Joe R. Lansdale

“Vanilla Ride was written under the influence of the [G. W.] Bush period. I was probably a little bit harder on some of the things going on then,” said Lansdale. “Religion, I’m often very hard on. That doesn’t mean I believe everyone who is religious are evil people. You talk about the extremists.”

In March, the University of Texas Press issued Chicken Fried and Sanctified: The Portable Lansdale, which conferred upon him some literary cred.

“Rightly or wrongly, I seem to be transcending just this genre label and [am now] being thought of just as an American writer. I think it’s because my themes are so American, even if I’m writing something that has a more of a genre construct or feel to it. There is something to the way I do it that appeals to people who might not ordinarily read genre fiction,” he says.

Top real-life fantasy and/or science fiction cities

At the creative writing program Shared Worlds students create fantasy and science fiction worlds that as the name implies are to be shared with others.

As a precursor to the forthcoming class (July 19-August 1 @ Wofford College), Jeff VanderMeer, Shared Worlds Assistant Director and Instructor, asked Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock the following question: "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"



Given this group, the answers not surprisingly encompassed a wide range of the Western world's cities-- from Reykavik to Kingston to Marrakesh and points inbetween. Some more views from the Eastern world would have been nice.

Having not traveled all that extensively (never out of North America), my pick would be Montreal with it's clash of cultures and languages. And hell, it's got a biosphere! Don't get much more sf geeky than that.



What would be your top real-life fantasy and/or science fiction city?

Star Trek Eggos!

While shopping for groceries this morning, I caught my first glimpse of the Limited Edition Star Trek Eggos!




Yes, you too can now how you're very own waffles with full color images of your favorite Trek characters!

Kirk & Spock

Nero

Besides the ones pictured, character waffles include Kirk, Spock, Kirk sitting in his Captain’s Chair, McCoy, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and Scotty.


Other waffles have logos and insignias:


Technology:


Planets:



And phrases including "Live Long and Prosper," "I’m Giving Her All She’s Got Captain!," "Beam Me Up," and "Highly Illogical."



No word yet on how they taste.

Graphics of Reality

My latest Nexus Graphica column is now available. This time, I explore the world of nonfiction comics.

"Like most young comic book readers of that decade [the 70s], my comic reading selections were dominated by DC and Marvel. Outside of the occasional war comic, neither offered much in the way of true stories, so I rarely experienced the nonfiction graphical narrative until high school."

"Art Spiegelman's Maus, cribbed from his father's remembrances, understandably caught my interest."

"Published as collection for the first time in 1990, Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe appealed to my dual interests of history and comics."

"Perhaps the greatest historian to work primarily in the graphic narrative format, Texan Jack Jackson began his artistic career under the nom de plume "Jaxon" as one of the first underground cartoonists with the self-published God Nose (1965)."

"In the early nineties, my own approach to writing changed when I discovered Harvey Pekar, who first started working on comics with his good friend, the legendary artist Robert Crumb."

"As part of their imprint Paradox Press, DC began publishing a series of "factoid books" headlined by The Big Book of... anthologies in 1994."

I talk about and review several other books as well. So check it out.

C.O.U.S.: Reflections from Rick's Collection #27

While "researching" a recent Nexus Graphica, I had reason to look through my collection of Comics Of Unusual Size. This set of the big and small and odd of comicdom offers many gems. Deciding that I really should share some of these largely forgotten and sometime rare pieces, I'm taking you through a tour of the more interesting selections.

In the 80s and 90s, it was not unusual to be handed Chick tracts at rock concerts. Published by Chick Publications, these rectangular palm sized pamphlets contained comic book stories that proselytized against great evils such as greed, gluttony, Catholism (and other "false" religions), Satanism, rock music, reincarnation, and Dungeons & Dragons.


Reputedly all written and drawn by company founder, Independent Baptist Jack T. Chick, there are over 200 tracts. Many of the Chick publications, which include traditional comics and prose books, are available in many languages and online.




The company's official statement of faith begins:

We hold that the Bible, the Holy Word of a Holy God, was not only free from error in the originals (which have been lost for centuries) but also we believe God in His Singular providential care has KEPT HIS WORD all through the ages, right down to the present day as found in the King James Version. We consider this version our final and absolute authority, above and beyond all other authorities on earth.

The short, laughingly heavy-handed, and often well drawn stories have achieved a cult-like status among non-believers. Currently, I own seven different volumes: The Pilgrims, Somebody Goofed, Holy Joe, The Trap, How To Get Rich, Ivan the Terrible, Bad Bob!, and Angels? Like many, I acquired several of these at concerts but some of them have been found in bookstore bathrooms and even hidden within books that were for sale!

Diplomacy

On the weekend Terminator: Salvation opens, check out this article in New Scientist on "Nine Games Computers are Ruining For Humanity." We're basically looking at the usual suspects--chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe, and more recently poker. My thought on this has always been: Wake me up when the machines start kicking ass at Diplomacy. 

For those who didn't waste their early years under the thumb of The Avalon Hill Game Company, Diplomacy, first published in 1959, is a social experiment in the guise of a World War I era wargame. Each player is one of the Great Powers, from Britain in the West to Turkey in the east.  Each turn represents a season of the year in which the player may move his armies and navies a limited distance on the board. Warfare is a simple matter: the country with the most armies or navies in support of its move wins. The genius of the game is that the Powers' strengths are calibrated to the point that it is impossible to win or even survive without alliances. As the rules politely state, "Diplomacy is a game of promises kept, and promises broken."

The game builds in a period between each turn for players to negotiate: 30 minutes before the first turn and 15 minutes between subsequent turns. This makes Diplomacy interminable face to face, but with adjustments it has proven perfect for playing by mail (and nowadays by e-mail). Anyway, after the negotiation period, players submit their orders in a specific language developed for the game. If an order is not expressed correctly, it does not occur. A simple example would be that if Turkey wanted to move an army to Constantinople to Bulgaria, the order would have to read A Con-Bul. If the army moving from Constantinople was moving to support an attack of another army, it would add an S and then list the army it was moving to support (A Con-Bul S A Rum-Bul). Orders are open and read and carried out if possible. Needless to say, this required specificity means that one of the most effective ways to stab someone in the back and retain some plausible deniability has always been to screw up the order on purpose. Head to Boardgame Geek for examples of Diplomacy perfidity. (My favorite is probably the father who taught his son how the world really works by solemnly sealing an alliance, showing him his written orders, and then through slight of hand, replacing the order with a blank piece of paper). 

Programming the computer in the Dip "language" would be easy enough. Additionally, there has to be an optimal play for each Power in each turn, and no doubt that could also be determined. I would think that the problem might be, as I said above, that you are almost never in a position to make the optimal move on your own. Establishing what should be done is the easy part; convincing another player or a group of players to assist is the difficulty. So assuming you played by e-mail, the computer would have to be programmed to propose alliances, analyze proposed alliances from other players, decide when to abandon a partnership, determine when a partner is about to deliver a well timed stab in the back (how do you express "untrustworthy son of a bitch" in binary?) and how to respond to that action. 

It could also create an interesting Turing situation--should the human players even be made aware that one or more of the countries in the game would be played by software? They probably shouldn't. Honestly, one of the things you have to deal with in Diplomacy is the meta-game--the emotional effect, i.e. simmering rage, your action will have on your opponent. If you know what you do will have no such effect on one of the players, and also no impact on her later dealings with you, you would probably feel freer to backstab her versus another player. (To be fair, if you know that one of your opponents will never renege on an agreement once made, that is temporarily a point in favor of that player, but to win the game, eventually you will have to abandon an agreement, or at least be able to entertain the possibility.) 

So bumbling through this, the key here isn't so much the number crunching because that part of the game is simplified enough (there are not that many pieces in the game and the situation on the game board is open) that it can be easily grasped by the human mind; the machine doesn't have its usual advantage in that area. What a computer would need to compete in Diplomacy is the ability to read human beings' intentions (which is no doubt coming) and the ability to mimic human behavior by convincingly lying its ass off, which one hopes is a little further down the road.